I position the moment of encounter on which I focus in this chapter, as a dynamic process in which both participants, person and thing, are active and significant. The chapter does not center on the technology, power, and role of the museum itself; the implication is not that the institution’s part is insubstantial (clearly it is not), but the aim is rather to shift attention to what happens between persons and things on a more micro scale. Throughout, the chapter draws on and develops other themes, in particular that of colonial encounters, as a metaphor through which both to visualize museum encounters and to begin to conceptualize them from the perspective of displayed things.
The attempt to take the artifact’s point of view will be problematic for many readers: surely museum objects – no more than scallops (see Callon 1986) – cannot have the subjectivity this seems to imply? Yet, as a thought experiment at least, I hope to show its value in demonstrating the flexibility and challenging potential of things in the museum. I consider it more than simply a rhetorical device or trick, however; instead, it is what the great Romantic biographer Richard Holmes, writing of subject-centered, visual and material biographical techniques, has called a “reversal of perspective, looking outwards from within … rather than the more usual attempt to look inwards from the outside … turning the viewpoint inside out, if only for a moment” ([1985] 2005, 178; emphasis original). In the setting of material objects, I propose, first, that this methodological volte-face, even if only fleeting, may be one way to consider what Brown calls the thingness of objects,1 which is what we confront “when they stop working for us: when the drill breaks, when the car stalls, when the windows get filthy” (2001, 4), and disable our usual “smooth coping” (Wheeler 2005, 129), and, arguably, operates in a special way in the museum where objects can no longer function as they were designed and/or we would ordinarily expect. Second, it is a procedural route toward a renewed thing centeredness in amended display and interpretive strategies that recognize people and objects alike are part of a mutually interdependent, material world, full of multiple and shifting meanings, values, and functions.
Colonial encounters
But if you missed the galloping freedom of the zebras in the savannah this morning, then so much the worse for you; the zebras will not be sorry that you were not there, and in any case you would have tamed, killed, photographed, or studied them. Things in themselves lack nothing, just as Africa did not lack whites before their arrival.
Latour 1988, 193
Visitors enter the museum from a very different world outside the institutional walls, a domain where objects are not generally put into vitrines or behind ropes for the edification and improvement of viewers. In that external, quotidian realm things are not always particularly thought about at all, and instead are used and interacted with all the time, as much a part of the life one lives and the sphere wherein one dwells, as one is oneself. People and objects alike move about, physically and metaphorically, all involved in the formation and continuation of myriad relationships, together constituting a social life of things as well as persons in the sense now so familiarly articulated by Appadurai (1986), Kopytoff (1986), and others. The daily processes by which we engage with and live through, indeed in some cases almost become one with (e.g., Merleau-Ponty 1962; Malafouris 2012), the material constituents of our world are habitually performed with relatively little unease or conscious awareness on our part. Exceptions, of course, occur when things fail to work properly or when certain objects – such as gifts from people who are special to us, or things that we value because of their antiquity or association with particular individuals – become disruptive or take on values and meanings that cause us to stop and contemplate, even momentarily. But in the course of my everyday activities most of the time I do not stop to think about my relationship with the clothes I am wearing (other than, perhaps, glancing in the mirror when I dress) or the chair on which I sit or the keyboard with which I type, or where the boundaries between the surfaces of my body and of those things – backside and chair, torso and sweater, fingertips and keyboard – actually lie. The same can be said for most other things in my daily life: cooking utensils, kitchen and bathroom appliances, my car, my phone, and so on; I do not experience these things “as aggregates of natural physical mass, but rather as a range of functions or effects that we rely upon” (Harman 2002, 18; emphasis original). Even special objects from which I may derive particular pleasure or which otherwise have notable significance for me, such as my wedding ring or treasured possessions of now lost loved ones, are things whose relationships to me, while I certainly do sometimes think about them, I rarely stop to reflect on at length.
The continually shifting material world of our everyday lives is thus one with which we are habitually familiar rather than something we have to confront or try to understand in daily life. That does not render it simple to explain from social science or humanities perspectives, as any walk around a university library will indicate. Nonetheless, the way in which we relate, or struggle to relate, to things in museums is quite different, and to enter such an institution is to journey to another kind of realm entirely. Perhaps for all of us, and particularly for those unfamiliar with its codes, to pass through the museum’s doors is to cross an ocean to a distant world that can seem very strange indeed in comparison to the one the traveler has left behind. This is not so much about the content of displays – though, of course, certain exhibitions may show artifacts that are in themselves wondrous and unfamiliar – but about the technology of the place, removing things (whatever they may be) from their ordinary contexts and apparently rendering them the object of the visitor’s gaze. The point here is not whether or how museums de- or recontextualize and thus change the meanings of the objects they display (see Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998). Rather, my emphasis is on the relative position of displayed object and viewing subject, and on the fact that the latter seems to gaze on the former. Gaze, in this context as in others, “implies more than to look at – it signifies a psychological relationship of power, in which the gazer is superior to the object of the gaze” (Schroeder 1998, 208; emphasis added).
In a museum there does, at first sight at least, appear to be such a relationship of power. The item on show seems passive in any engagement with a viewer (the gazer); the two cannot normally interact as fully or equally as they would in a different setting, and the visitor performs as an active participant making a “discovery.” The participant who is “at home” (in the sense of always remaining in the place that the other party is only visiting), the museum object, is apparently rendered effectively weaker than the incomer from the distant world outside.
In this the museum encounter is analogous to the colonial encounter, at least as far as it initially appeared to colonials traveling from metropole to periphery: the traveler from afar (the museum visitor) comes to a wondrous place full of strange and amazing objects, where things are done very differently and all is unfamiliar; yet, although she is a visitor, out of her comfort zone and far from home, it is still her way of seeing that apparently comes to dominate the engagements between herself and the dwellers (the objects) in this foreign land (the museum). (Though, as we shall see later in the chapter, studies of colonial contexts have demonstrated, importantly, that the relationships and influences involved were in actuality rather more complex, subtle, and multidirectional; e.g., Thomas 1991). From the colonialist’s point of view, the place traveled to and the things encountered there seem exotic, curious, and remote from their own domain. This new world itself thus becomes constructed, in the colonialist’s mind, as remote and strange, an imagined place constrained within physical boundaries, as Ardener describes for the process of colonization around the world:
for Europe, “remote areas” … have had a different conceptual geography … “remote” was actually compounded of “imaginary” as well as “real” places … imagined … yet … located eventually in limited and specific places. (1987, 40)
This imagined, remote, exotic quality is, however, very much the view of the outsider, the colonizer (we shall return to this later).
In this colonial